law

Ride-sharing service Uber has pulled their service from the sate of Nevada, following a statewide injunction against the company. Washoe County District Court Judge Scott Freeman issued the injunction after the Nevada State Supreme Court ruled, in a split vote, that the District Court must hear the case. In a blog post on Uber’s site, a representative named “William” said Uber was committed to Nevada long-term, but the ruling made operating there basically impossible for now. There is no current timetable for additional rulings in the matter.

Smartphone users in the US rejoice. You now have less clutter to stare at on the back of your devices. President Barack Obama has just signed into law the E-Labels Act which loosens the noose on device manufacturers to physically imprint regulators' signages on devices. This serves to clear up some room and conserve some space on devices, especially smaller ones. But considering it is just a US law, device makers will still have to comply with similar policies in other countries in the meantime.

Europol announced on Thursday that a sting operation had led to the arrest of 15 individuals in seven different countries across Europe for using malware and remote access trojans (RATs) to harm others and commit cybercrimes. This incident follows a similar crackdown in May 2014 that resulted in over 100 arrests around the globe.

A 69 year old Oklahoma man has been indicted by a federal grand jury for teaching customers how to beat polygraph tests, or lie detector tests, on his website Polygraph.com. Doug Williams, a former police officer, faces charges of obstruction of justice, as well as fraud, for basically instructing people "to lie or conceal crimes during polygraph examinations."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is continuing to make its best efforts at ensuring the act of jailbreaking devices like smartphones and tablets remains a legal act. The organization said this week that it has filed a petition with the U.S. Librarian of Congress and the Copyright Office, arguing that jailbreaking is not a crime, and that it should not be seen as a violation of the U.S.'s Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).

In the ongoing conversation about an open Internet, the main topic of discussion is about pipelines. Some would like the Internet to remain as-is, while some others want there to be a paid and free service; tiered Internet, so to speak. In Colorado this week, citizens took back their right to have Internet as they choose, just in a different way. A previously implemented ban on community broadband service was overturned, as a majority of voters want their Internet back.

In a somewhat amusing turn of events, Google has just emerged victorious in what could have been a major battle over licensing fees with Axel Springer, Germany's biggest news publisher. Axel Springer reinstated the tech company's ability to publish both headlines and snippets of news, citing plummeting Internet traffic after it revoked those rights for a two week experiment. The almost ironic thing is that Google practically "won" this issue not by fighting for it in court or in media but by actually complying with the new German law.

Spain is now among the growing number of European countries to pass intellectual property laws that labels search engines and news aggregators, such as Google News, as infringing on copyrights when they link to news stories. The Spanish parliament approved new laws on Thursday, to go into effect on January 1st, 2015, allowing news publishers to charge a fee each time search engines display their content in search results.

A 20-week study in London just completed this week utilized predictive software to spot potential gang-related crimes before they happen. Using software developed by Accenture, this project targeted individuals across all known gangs in each of London's 32 boroughs. "Our goal," said James Slessor, Managing Director of Accenture's policing and public safety business, "was to provide MPS with an unprecedented level of insight and intelligence to help them continue to reduce gang-related crimes in the city." With analytics information in hand, the London Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) was able to assess the likelihood of known individuals re-offending.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio revealed on Friday that all 35,000 of the city's police officers were going to be issued smartphones as part of a $160 million technology initiative. While it wasn't officially stated, a glimpse at some of the devices, which also includes 6,000 tablets to be installed in police vehicles, seems to indicate that Windows will be operating system flavor.